Mythago Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  Here, now, was that same tune. It made the flesh on my arms and neck tingle. Guiwenneth and the horned leader danced joyously to the melody, holding hands, twirling and circling about each other, while the other men edged closer, bringing the light nearer.

  Abruptly, with a moment’s shared laughter, the awkward dance ceased. Guiwenneth turned to me and beckoned, and I stepped from the cover of the trees, into the clearing. Guiwenneth said something to the leader of the night hunt, and he grinned broadly. He walked slowly over to me, and around me, inspecting me as if I were a piece of sculpture. His smell was overwhelming, his breath stale and fetid. He towered over me by a good twelve inches, and when he reached out to pinch the flesh of my right shoulder the fingers were huge, and that simple gesture, I thought, would break my bones. But he smiled through the heavy layers of black paint, and said, ‘Masgoiryth k’k’ thas’k hurath. Aur’th. Uh?’

  ‘I agree entirely,’ I murmured, and smiled, and gave him a friendly punch on the arm. The muscles below his furs were like steel. He roared with laughter, shook his head, then returned to Guiwenneth. They spoke quickly for a few seconds, then he took her hands in his, raised them to his breast and pressed them there. Guiwenneth seemed delighted, and when this brief ritual was done he knelt before her again, and she leaned down and kissed the top of his head. She came over to me then, and walked more slowly, less excitedly, although in the light of the torches her face was aglow with anticipation, and with affection, I thought. Perhaps love. She took my hands and kissed me on the cheek. Her brutish friend followed her. ‘Magidion!’ she said, by way of introducing him, and said to him, ‘Steven.’

  He watched me; his face seemed to indicate pleasure, but there was a sharpness in his gaze, a narrowing of his eyes, that was almost like a warning. This man was Guiwenneth’s forest guardian, the leader of the Jaguth. The words of my father’s journal were clearly in my mind as I stared at him, and felt Guiwenneth drawing closer to me.

  The others came forward then, torches held high, faces dark, yet without threat. Guiwenneth pointed at each in turn and said their names: ‘Am’rioch, Cyredich, Dunan, Orien, Cunus, Oswry …’

  She frowned and glanced at me, her bright face suddenly clouded with sad awareness. Looking at Magidion, she said something, and repeated a word that was clearly a name. ‘Rhydderch?’

  Magidion drew a breath, shrugged his broad shoulders. He spoke briefly and softly, and Guiwenneth’s grip on mine tightened.

  When she looked at me there were tears in her eyes. ‘Guillauc. Rhydderch. Gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’ I asked quietly, and Guiwenneth said, ‘Called.’

  I understood: First Guillauc, then Rhydderch, had been called by the entity, the Jagad. The Jaguth belonged to her, the price of Guiwenneth’s freedom. They quested, now, in other places, other times, in pursuit of whatever the Jagad required of them. Their tales were for another age; their journeys would become the legends of another race.

  Magidion drew a short, dull-bladed sword from within the confines of his furs, and detached the scabbard after. These two items he presented to me, speaking softly, his voice an animal growl. Guiwenneth watched delightedly, and I took the gift, sheathed the blade and bowed. His huge hand came down on my shoulder again, squeezing painfully as he leaned closer, still whispering to me. Then he smiled broadly, nudged me closer to the girl, made a whooping night sound, which was echoed by his acquaintances, and drew back from us.

  With our arms around each other, Guiwenneth and I watched as the night hunt withdrew deeper into the edge woods, the torches extinguished by night and distance. A final sounding of the horn drifted towards us, and then the wood was silent.

  She slipped into my bed, a nude, cool shape, and reached for me in the darkness. We lay, hugging each other, shivering slightly, even though these dead hours of the morning were by no means cold. All sleep fled from me, my senses heightened, my body tingled. Guiwenneth whispered my name, and I whispered hers, and each time we kissed the embrace grew more passionate, more intimate. In the darkness her breathing was the sweetest sound in the world. With the first stray light of dawn I saw her face again, so pale, so perfect. We lay close, quiet now, staring at each other, occasionally laughing. She took my hand, pressed it to her small breast. She gripped my hair, then my shoulders, then my hips. She wriggled then lay calm, cried then smiled, kissed me, touched me, showed me how to touch her, finally moved easily beneath me. After that first minute of love we could hardly stop staring at each other, and smiling, giggling, rubbing noses, as if we couldn’t quite believe that what was happening was really happening.

  From that moment on, Guiwenneth made Oak Lodge her home, placing her spear against the gate, her way of indicating that she was finished with the wildwoods.

  Ten

  I loved her more intensely than I would have believed possible. Just to say her name, Guiwenneth, made my head spin. When she whispered my name, and teased me with passionate words in her own tongue, I felt an ache in my chest, and happiness that was almost overwhelming.

  We worked on the house, keeping it tidy, rearranging the kitchen to make it more acceptable to Guiwenneth, who enjoyed preparing food as much as I did. She hung hawthorn and birch twigs over every door and window: to keep out ghosts. We moved my father’s furniture out of the study, and Guiwenneth created a sort of private nest for herself in that oak-infested room. The forest, having grasped the house so firmly through this one chamber, now seemed to rest. I had half expected that each night more massive roots and trunks would surge through the plaster and the brickwork, until nothing but the occasional window and roof tile could be seen of Oak Lodge among the branches of a tangle of trees. The saplings in the garden and fields grew taller. We worked vigorously clearing them from the garden itself, but they crowded round the fencing and beyond the gate, creating a sort of orchard around us. Now, to get to the main woodland, we had to pick our way through that orchard, stamping out footpaths. This enclosing limb of forest was two hundred yards wide, and on either side was open land. The house rose from the middle of the trees, its roof overgrown with tendrils of the oak that had emerged through the study. The whole area was strangely quiet, uncannily still. Silent, that is, save for the laughter and activity of the two people who inhabited the garden glade.

  I loved watching Guiwenneth work. She fashioned clothes out of every item of Christian’s wardrobe she could find. She would have worn shirts and trousers until they rotted on her, but every day we washed ourselves, and every third day our dirty garments, and slowly Guiwenneth’s forest smell vanished. She seemed slightly uncomfortable with this, and in this way was unlike the Celtic people of her time, who were fastidiously clean, using soap, which the Romans did not, and regarding the invading legions as quite filthy! I liked her when she smelled faintly of Lifebuoy soap and perspiration; she took every opportunity to squeeze the sap of leaves and plants on to her skin, however.

  Within two weeks her command of English was so good that only occasionally did she give herself away with some awkward conjunction, or startling misuse of a word. She insisted that I attempt to acquire some Brythonic, but I proved to be no linguist, finding even the simplest of words impossible to wrap my tongue, palate and lips around. It made her laugh, but it also irritated her. I soon understood why. English, for all its sophistication, its content of other languages, its expressiveness, was not a natural language to Guiwenneth. There were things that she could not express in English. Mostly feelings, they were nevertheless of intense importance to her. To tell me she loved me in English was fine, and I shivered each time she used those magic words. But to her, true meaning came in saying ‘M’n care pinuth’, using her own words to express her love. I never felt as overwhelmed with feeling when she spoke that foreign phrase, though, and here was the simple problem: she needed to see and sense me responding to her words of love, but I could only respond to words that meant very little to her.

  And there was so much more than love to express. I could se
e it, of course. Each evening, as we sat on the lawn, or walked quietly through the oak orchard, her eyes glittered, her face was soft with affection. We stopped to kiss, to hug, even to make love in the still woodland, and every single thought and mood was understood by the other. But she needed to say things to me, and she could not find the English words to express how she felt, how close to some aspect of nature she felt, how like a bird, or a tree she felt. Something, some way of thinking that I can only crudely translate, could not be put into English, and sometimes she cried because of it, and I felt very sad for her.

  Just once, in those two months of the summer – when I could not have conceived of greater happiness, nor have imagined the tragedy that was gaining on us by the hour – just once I tried to get her to move away from the house, to come with me to the bigger towns. With great reluctance, she wrapped one of my jackets around her, belting it at the waist as she belted everything. Looking like the most magnificently pretty of scarecrows, her feet bare but for some home-made leather sandals, she started to walk with me along the track to the main road.

  We held hands. The air was hot and still. Guiwenneth’s breathing grew more laboured, her look more wild. Suddenly she clenched my hand as if in pain, and drew a sharp breath. I looked at her and she was staring at me, almost pleading with me. Her expression was confused, a mixture of need – the need to please me – and fear.

  And equally suddenly she had slapped both hands to her head and screamed, beginning to back away from me.

  ‘It’s all right, Guin!’ I yelled, and made after her, but she had begun to cry, turning and running back towards the tall wall of young oaks that marked the orchard.

  Only when she was standing within their shade did she calm down. Tearfully, she reached for me, and just hugged me, very hard, and very long. She whispered something in her own language, and then said, Tm sorry, Steven. It hurts.’

  ‘That’s okay. It’s okay,’ I soothed; and hugged her. She was shaking badly, and later I learned that it had been a physical pain, a shooting pain through her whole body, as if she were being punished for straying so far from the mother wood.

  In the evening, after sundown, but at a time when the world outside was still quite bright, I found Guiwenneth in the cage of oak, the deserted study where the wildwoods grew. She was curled up in the embrace of the thickest trunk, which forked as it sprouted from below the floor, and formed a cradle for her. She stirred as I stepped into the cold, gloomy room. My breath frosted. The branches, with their broad leaves, quivered and trembled, even when I was still. They were aware of me, unhappy with my presence in the room.

  ‘Guin?’

  ‘Steven … ’ she murmured, and sat up, reaching her hand for me. She was dishevelled and had been crying. Her long, luxurious hair was tangled and twisted about the sharp bark of the tree, and she laughed as she tugged the wild strands loose. Then we kissed and I squeezed into the tight fork of the trunk, and we sat there, shivering slightly.

  ‘It’s always so cold in here.’

  She wrapped her arms around me, rubbed her hands vigorously up and down my back. ‘Is that better?’

  ‘It’s good just to be with you. I’m sorry you’re upset.’

  She continued to try and warm me. Her breath was sweet, her eyes large and moist. She snatched a kiss, then rested her lips against the angle of my jaw, and I knew she was thinking hard about something that disturbed her deeply. Around us, the silent forest watched, enclosing us with its supernatural iciness.

  ‘I can’t leave here,’ she said.

  ‘I know. We won’t try again.’

  She pulled back, her lips trembling, her face frowning as she verged on tears again. She said something in her own language, and I reached and wiped the two tears that welled up in the corner of her eyes. ‘I don’t mind,’ I said.

  ‘I do,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll lose you.’

  ‘You won’t. I love you too much.’

  ‘I love you very much too. And I’ll lose you. It’s coming, Steven. I can feel it. Terrible loss.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘I can’t leave here. I can’t go beyond this place, this wood. I belong here. It won’t let me go.’

  ‘We’ll stay together. I’ll write a book about us. We’ll hunt wild pig.’

  ‘My world is small,’ she said. ‘I can run across my world in days. I stand on a hill and I see a place that is beyond my grasp. My world is tiny compared to yours. You will want to go away, northwards, to the cold place. Southwards to the sun. You will want to go west, to the wild lands. You won’t stay here forever, but I have to. They won’t let me go.’

  ‘Why are you so worried? If I go away it’ll only be for a day or two. To Gloucester, London. You’ll be safe. I shan’t leave you. I couldn’t leave you, Guin. My God, if only you could feel what I feel. I’ve never been so happy in my life. What I feel for you terrifies me, sometimes, it’s so strong.’

  ‘Everything about you is strong,’ she said. ‘You may not realize it now. But when … ’ She trailed off, frowning again, biting back the words until I prompted her to continue. She was a girl, a child. She hugged me, and let her tears come softly and uninhibited. This was not the warrior princess, the fast-running, quick-witted hunter of the day before. Here was that wonderful part of her which, as in all people, had deep and helpless need of another. If ever my Guiwenneth had needed humanizing, now was the time I saw it. Woodland-born though she was, she was flesh and blood, and feeling, and she was more wonderful to me than anything I had ever known in my life.

  It grew dark outside, but she spoke of the fear she felt as we sat, frozen stiff, embracing, embraced by our friend, the oak.

  ‘We will not always be together,’ she said.

  ‘Impossible.’

  She bit her lip, then brushed her nose against mine, coming as close as possible. ‘I’m from that other land, Steven. If you don’t go from me, then one day I may go from you. But you are strong enough to bear the loss.’

  ‘What are you saying, Guin? Life is just beginning.’

  ‘You are not thinking. You don’t want to think!’ She was angry. ‘I am wood and rock, Steven, not flesh and bone. I am not like you. The wood protects me, rules me. I can’t express it properly. I don’t have the words. For a time, now, we can be together. But not forever.’

  ‘I’m not going to lose you, Guin. Nothing will stand in the way of us, nothing, not the wood, not my wretched brother, not that beast thing, that Urscumug.’

  She hugged me again, and in the faintest of voices, almost as if she knew she was asking something that was impossible, she said, ‘Look after me.’

  Look after me!

  It made me smile, at the time. Me look after her? It was all I could do to keep her in sight when we hunted the edgewoods. In pursuit of a hare, or wild piglet, a major factor contributing to the logistics of success was my tendency to perspire and gasp myself close to death when running. Guiwenneth was swift, fit and deadly. She never showed any sign of irritation at my failure to reflect her own stamina in mine. She accepted a failed hunt with a shrug and a smile. She never boasted a successful hunt, although, in contrast, I always felt delighted and smug when we were able to supplement our diet with the product of our forest strategy and hunter’s skill.

  Look after me. Such a simple statement, and it had made me smile. Yes, I could see that in matters of love, she was as vulnerable as me. But I could think of her only as a powerful presence in my life. I looked to Guiwenneth for the lead in almost everything, and it neither shames me, nor embarrasses me to state that. She could run half a mile through undergrowth and slit the throat of a forty-pound wild pig with hardly any effort; I was more orderly and organized than her and brought to her life a degree of comfort that she had not known before.

  To each their own. Skills used unselfishly make for cooperation. In six weeks of living with, and deeply loving Guiwenneth, I had learned how easy it was to look to her for the lead, for she was an expert in survival,
a hunter, an individual in every way, who had chosen to combine her life essence with mine, and in that I basked.

  Look after me!

  If only I had. If only I could have learned her language, and learned, thus, the terrible fear that haunted this most beautiful and innocent of girls.

  ‘What is your earliest memory, Guin?’

  We were walking in the late afternoon, skirting the wood to the south, between the trees and Ryhope. It was cloudy, but warm. The depression of the day before had passed, and as is the way with young lovers, somehow the anxiety and pain of what we had talked about so briefly had brought us closer, and made us more cheerful. Hand in hand we kicked through long grass, picked carefully between the sprawling, fly-infested pats of cow dung, and walked always with the Norman tower of St Michael’s church in the distance.

  Guiwenneth remained silent, although she hummed softly to herself, a broken tune, weird, rather like the music of the Jaguth. Some children were running across the Lower Grubbings, throwing a stick for a dog, and shrieking with boyish laughter. They saw us and obviously realized that they were trespassing, and cut off away from us, vanishing over a rise of ground. The dog’s hysterical barking drifted on the still air. I saw one of the Ryhope girls riding at a canter along the bridle-way towards St Michael’s.

  ‘Guin? Is that too tough a question?’

  ‘What question, Steven?’ She glanced at me, dark eyes gleaming, mouth touched with a smile. In her way she was teasing me, and before I could restate my query, she broke from me and raced – all flapping white shirt and baggy flannels – to the woodland edge and peered inside.

  Raising a finger to her lips as I approached, she murmured, ‘Quiet... quiet... oh, by the God Cernunnos … !’

  My heart began to beat faster. I peered into the darkness of the wood, seeking among the tangled growth for whatever she had seen.

  By the God Cernunnos?

  The words were like pinches and punches to my mind, teasing strokes, and slowly I became aware that Guiwenneth was in a very playful mood.